So I can’t help but notice that half of the healing classes (shamz and priests) acquired some overall buffage with patch 4.0.6 and as per tradition we got more of our mechanics trivialized.

I can imagine that there are some folks out there saying but wait Pork, didn’t you see the buff to DP? Yes I read that bit too but I hardly consider it a buff. With DL, HL, and FL costing us ten percent more mana, I have the sneaking suspicion that Blizz is not happy over abundance of mana (assuming you’re not using FL at all and using HR sparingly) and we should expect some OOMage when raiding tonight.

I am definitely not saying that the other classes did not deserve a buff and to be frank it makes our jobs easier. I was very surprised to see resto droods get an over the head swing with the nerfbat as well. Chad, healing lead and a mate who I talk about on the blog gave up his restro drood in favor for his holy priest. Hearing him talk about the spec’s weaknesses and reasons for rerolling, I was expecting to see some improvements made.

I am not going to start feeling sorry for myself yet but I do feel bad for healadins who are still gearing in heroics. I remember back when I was hating every second of it and I can’t help but think that the headblow to PoTI and our main healing arsenal becoming more expensive is going to take a heavy toll on what I remember being a very strained mana pool.

Last night Yoda, our resto shamz pst me and said something to the effect of is my meter correct that you were at about 100% mana the whole time we were killing Magmaw? I admitted yes and he said that in the future he’d ask for additional raid heals if he was getting low on mana. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was being pretty liberal in tossing out heals to everyone. I was worried he might reroll and steal all my drops.

All kidding aside I can understand why Blizz increased the mana cost of DL and HL. It would have been nice if they had left FL as is because they just made a very big waste of mana (which was on par with other healing classes big mana heals) an even bigger waste of mana. No one in their right mind should be using this spell now. But to be honest I didn’t use this spell and so I am not upset by these changes.

I am upset about the change to PoTI. I can’t help but think that this isn’t just a nerf to our talent it’s also going to be a nerf to HoSac, which is my favorite Cd. I really hope that we will still be able to use this ability without having to worry about dying because it is perfect for both heavy tank damage mitigation or just saving some mana.

Some changes I would have liked to see…

A raid wide damage mitigation Cd, making us a more effective option for raid healing

A boost to HS healing output for a lil more healing on the go

LoH returns mana without glyphing (less mana would be ok) so it does not feel quite as mandatory freeing up space for something more fun

A shorter Cd on HR, again increasing our ability to raid heal, the mana cost is high enough that you don’t want to spam this

These are just some things I brainstormed last night while thinking about the changes that Blizz made to us in 4.0.6. I think none of the changes make our class more fun to play. I also think they further pigeon-hole us in the tank healer role. What changes to holy paladins would you like to see? How could Blizz make our class for fun to play? As alway, your thoughts are always appreciated.

I kid, I kid, But really, you should have seen the look on your faces when you read this title. I have been seeing a whole lot of qq on the forums (Still?) about the latest edition to the World of Warcraft legacy being too hard. I personally don’t think it’s shaping out to be too hard or too easy. Of course I am a Pally healer and I do have plenty of nerfs in my future.

Obsessive, my ten man raid team was able to one shot Double Dragons on Tuesday night. This was a big credit to Adgamorix’s (of Divine Plea) response to me calling in a life line for tips on this fight. Thanks dood! Using their strat we were able to cut down our kill time significantly and able to cut down on overall healing. In case you missed the comment, the main difference in this strat with the one we were using is this…

During the second phase you have a mele group stacked on the butt of the dragon you have your ranged group spread out around the dragon (within healing range) instead of stacking. When one of the ranged folks get the Twilight Meteor debuff they run to the mele group to split the damage.

This means that half of the people in our raid are going to be moving less than if they were stacked. They will also be taking less damage from Engulfing Magic and Void Zones. The only time they will need to move is for the Meteor or if a Void Zone spawns under them. This makes Engulfing Magic a no brainer for the ranged because they can just stay where they are and dps without hurting anyone else in the raid.

I also like this because if I get EM and change lanes without checking my blind spot then I only have to worry about nuking one player instead of a carload of them. Love this because using boss mechanics to nuke most of the raid is like a FFVII style Limit Break for me. You could say it’s my special ability 🙂

With this tip and some practice your group should be able to one-shot the boss every time. Heres a quick rundown of the fight.

Valiona’s (purple dragon) first, position the raid five yards apart around the boss to avoid taking damage from Twilight Blasts. We practiced our positioning on Red’s Pet which was kinda silly and fun but kinda helped. Run in for Blackout, Cleanse it and run out (if you don’t have Sacred Cleansing talented then someone else will have to do it). During the Blackout healers should pop their AOE heals (like HR) becuase this part can be a bit messy if not timed perfectly around Twilight Blasts.

You will have to deal with the occasional frontal cone AOE, Devouring Flames. Just move to the back-end of the boss and then return to the original positions. Someone usually takes some damage from this so be ready to heal them up fast. Rinse, repeat, phase two is starting when she puts down Dazzling Destruction. Get sucked in you end up in the Twilight Zone or some terrible place like it and you have to click on the portal to get out.

Theralion (blue dragon) comes down and it’s time to put the strat above into action. Mele stack on the butt, ranged spread out around the dragon. Ranged move in for Meteor, Mele move out for the Engulfing Magic. DBM will mark players with these debuffs. Also remember to stay out of the poop (Void Zones). Toward the end of the phase you’ll have to deal with three bouts of Deep Breaths from the flying dragon. Have a member call out safe zones. Stairs, Mid, Door worked pretty well for us.

Awesome fight with some cool mechanics. Now we are working on Al’Akir and Atramedes as our progression. We got Atramedes down to about 40% health on Monday so hopefully we can open it up and take it home the next time we get in there. I’ll let you know. Thanks for reading and enjoying and I want to hear from YOU, Do you think Cata is too easy? Too hard? Or not as bad as everyone is saying? let me know.

If you read the comments thread from my last post then you already know that last night we downed Maloriak and I got the healing trinket Jar of Ancient Remedies. I could not be more pleased with the way the team performed last night. Each attempt we got steadily closer and closer to downing the boss.

It doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes it can seem like your team is working backwards. We’ve all been there, after a long night of wiping, people are starting to lose their concetration and get sloppy. Our raid leader usually calls it early if he notices that we are fighting the morale monster along side the boss.

This is always greatly appreciated and I feel like it actually helps us in the future. I feel like (and you may have experienced this) players can get a mental block which can keep them from downing a boss as a result of low morale. Raid leader take note, if you notice your team is loosing that forward momentum on a boss move on to a different boss or call it a night. The extra time spent wiping should not be considered valuable practice attempts.

Here’s some more food for thought. No it’s not pie and it’s definently not cake, the cake is a lie. I am mostly solely responsible for keeping both tanks up during the encounter. I get help from the other healers in emergency situations but in obsessive we echew the model where you assign a healer to each tank. Instead we have two “raid” healers and we all work together to help out where we can if needed. Most my time spent is healing the unbeaconed tank, spamming LoD on the raid and shooting off a quick heal if I see someone who is scary low on health.

As we all know there is usually a running commentary going on in most raids between the tanks and the healers. Good communication is always important but vent can get pretty crowded with too many people talking. Our tanks are nice enough to let us know when they are going to be taking big damage by shouting “Big Heals!” Big heals means that the tank who yells it is going to have to be peeled off the floor if we don’t react fast.

This is fool-proof for abilities like Magmaw’s Mangle and Maloriak’s Dibilitating Slime. It’s great for me becuase I have trouble with tunnel vision while watching healthbars and Cd timers. Usually the raid leader is going to be calling out a lot of different abilites by name but abilities that effect the healers get our special little code word. If your tanks are not already giving the healers tipoffs like this for progression content then you can recommend it. Feel free to borrow Big Heals too. I found it really useful on Maloriak to hold off on using HoSac (which I normally use on Cd as a mana saving device) untill Nex utters (in his charming french-canadian accent) those two spiffy little words.

Next up we will be working on Atramedes and did I mention that we downed double dragons sometime in the last two weeks? Expect a strat posted with some tips the next time we down it. Also any tips on that fight are greatly appreciated as it wasn’t a very clean kill last time and I’m not looking forward to stepping to the duo again.

Trinkets have always been my favorite pieces of gear, with weapons being a close second. I love that you can’t always measure how good a trinket is by it’s ilvl. Like the Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman trinket for tanking. I used it right up untill Icecrown opened for business and I got my second 251 trinket. I always have collected trinkets.

In fact cleaning out my bank recently, I had trinkets dating back to Naxx that made me way too sentimental trying to delete. I could not bring myself to delete my Onxyia trinket. I didn’t have nearly as much trouble deleting my T10 gear as I did letting go of my trinket collection.

Trinkets are so much fun. I like being able to swap them out for different fights. I love being able to use different combinations to different effects and being able to macro them to other abilities. When are we going to get a legendary trinket? How cool would that be? C’mon Blizz please…

Anyway let’s go over what we have for trinkets available from regular raiding content and in a later post I may talk about the heroic versions. There’s a lot of debate over which are the best and I want to hear what the community at large is excited about adding to their trinket slots.

Here are the current options for ilvl 359 PvE healing trinkets and between you and me Mandala and Lifebound Alchemist Stone (not listed above) with their Mastery stat increase just are not an option. Right now Holy Paladin Mastery is just the crust in our stat pie with int, spirit, haste and crit being the ooey gooey goodness inside. You’re going to be better off using heroic dungeon trinkets over either of these.

Edit: With the change to Mandala in 4.0.6, this trinket becomes an easily accessible epic trinket worthwhile for holy paladins.

Jar of Ancient Remedies is probably my number one pick for trinket. I am going to be gunning for this pretty hard if it drops when we down Maloriak tonight. Not only does this trinket provide more mp5 after the ramp up than any other trinket but can be used on a 2 minute Cd to give you back some sweet sweet mana. Bonus: can also be used to give a fellow healer or dps mana too! I have read that there is a bug where the USE function does not work unless you target yourself or an ally but this macro is a workaround

Tyrande’s Favorite Doll yields the next highest mp5 with the same int bonus as the rest of the trinkets. From what I read this trinket is very, very hard to farm and I haven’t been very good about working on my Archy. I don’t plan on having this trinket ever but if I did then it might clock in as second on my list. Worth about 350mp5 for healers when used on the one minute Cd.

Darkmoon Card: Tsunami is a much more reasonable pick for a second trink slot. Unfortunately this trinket is not a drop so some people may not be able to afford it. If you’re not lucky enough to be able to make it yourself then you should definitely check out The Holy Paladin Blogs guide to getting it on the cheap. You can find it here. This beastly craftable can add an easy 260mp5 in a constant stream so nothing to think about just equip it and go. Amazing for Holy Pallies because it double procs with beacon and can proc all five stacks from light of dawn if you hit five targets.

Fall of Mortality has a variable proc rate of roughly about once every 60-90 seconds. This equals out to be about 298-198 mp5. This even at its minimum would be worth more mp5 than The Core, so don’t waste your valor points. If you don’t want to miss out on the int bonus from trinkets then leave out The Jar and use this along with Tsunami or The Doll

I would not advise wasting your valor points on The Core of Ripeness. It only results in about 195 mp5 when used on Cd. Only pick this up if you have so many extra valor points that you don’t know what to do with them and no other ilvl 359 epic PvE trinkets.

Yesterday’s addon post only whetted my appetite for another addons article. Where before I outlined some really helpful raiding addons, today I’d like to narrow down the list to addons specifically for Holy Paladins so I can include it in the How to Healadin Compendium. You may see a little overlap.

Vuhdo- is a must for all paladins. My favorite healing helping addon. With this addon you can bind any spell or macro to a mouse button or modifier key (alt, ctrl, shift) with mouse button. It also has a buff tracker which tracks beacon, seals, blessings and auras. A tank might use this addons for the buff trackers as well as to bind a spell like HoSalv so they can quickly pop it on a raid member without changing targets.

SpellFlash: Healadin- Works with SpellFlash Addon to Signal which healing spell to use after a specific proc. I have not tried this addon but I imagine it will be even more important with the upcoming nerf(s) that we do not miss one precious proc.

HolyTrinity- My prefered HoPo tracker. I do not use the Blizzard default. This addons comes with some Cd timers for some Paladin spells but I disabled them in the interface. This addon is easily resized but not so easy to move. It took some finagling but I got it to fit perfect between my toolbar and auras. There are many other addons that will track HoPo. This one can only be found on WowInterface.

ProcWatch- Great for tracking awesome healadin procs. Bonus: easily configured, moved and resized. PowerAuras is cool too but I could not figure out how to configure it.

PallyPower- If you’re opposed to using Vuhdo then PallyPower can be a decent way to track timers for Blessings, Seals, Auras and Righteous Fury. I mostly included this in the post because during Wrath Pallies needed some system for dealing with all of our buffs and this was the best.

nUI: Paladin Dashboard Skin- Just when you thought nUI couldn’t get any more pimp you realize that someone has created a cosmetic upgrade that adds a sweet paladin crest into the dashboard.

If you know of any other phenominal paladin healing addons let me know and I’ll add ’em to the list.

On Monday evening we easily downed Omnitron. We had stacked some good practice attempts under our belt from last week so we were able to one shot it. Not a bad fight in terms of mechanics. It’s the standard don’t stand in this, kite and nuke adds, move out of the laser, swap boss targets with shared health pool council style fight. There is a lot of damage hitting the raid and I found that though I was the prescribed tank healer, I needed to help out with heals where I could.

I used HR like Paragon uses Druids during this encounter and this took a serious drain on my mana pool. One tip I would recommend is having someone call out the blue circle (Power Generator) that healers can stand in to restore mana. They can be difficult to see during the encounter as there is graphical mayhem all over the place. These bosses have a never ending health pool and mana was a serious issue towards the end of the fight.

Taking a healing reduction from DP whenever it came off Cd was not an issue. Despite using it on Cd, I still needed two innervates during the fight. By the end of the fight I was tossing whatever heals I could out to heal the tanks with no mana and desperately counting down the seconds until DP came of Cd. If you are struggling with mana it may be better to BL/TW during Arcanotron when the healers are all standing in a blue circle as the effects of BL/TW stack with Power Generator.

We spent the rest of the night getting cozy with the creepiest alchemist and creator of Chimera…

Despite the vicious rumor that at its core Maloriak is just a tank and spank, there is a lot more to it than that. There are adds, there are interrupts, there is an iceblock that does damage when you’re put inside and damage when you’re broken out. There is a frontal cone AOE effect that the raid has to stack for and someone who gets a debuff and has to run out of the group.

This AOE hits for a lot so this is where you’re going to use your HR along with AW if you have it available for use. You’re going to want to pop DP as much as you can during this fight and I found that directly after the adds go down after the green vial goes out was an ok place to pop it.

Mana wasn’t too big an issue for me on this fight so don’t be afraid to share that extra mana by spot healing the raid if things get hairy. I will write another post on this encounter when we down it. When we called it on Monday we were beating our faces against his enrage so expect a post soon.

Last night my raid team and I downed Magmaw. Another first tier raid boss, like the others this boss was easy and straightforward. It has a very fun mechanic where three dps jump up on Magmaw, chain the spike and pull his head down onto it. During this phase I was regenerating as much mana as possible and dpsing Magmaw’s impaled head with Judge and CS, even threw down a Cons once or twice.

Instead of using the Tankspot strat where you spit mele, ranged and tanks into the stacking groups, stacked everyone under the left side of the boss, the tanks under the right and our hunter kited the adds within range of the healers. The Pillar of Flame never spawned under our dps or tank group in any of our attempts. It is less likely to happen if everyone is within mele range.

We tried not dpsing the Lava Parasites, having our hunter kite all of them around during the fight. This ended up being more trouble and we decided it proved easier to just dps them down as they spawned.

Magmaw will cast Ignition, marking the beginning of phase 2. When the smoke would appear on the left side where the dps were, then everyone would go to the right of the boss where the tanks were. If the tanks were in the Ignition then we just healed them through the extra damage. After Ignition the worm slumps forward where the flames were. stunning and causing damage to anyone crushed underneath. This is something that people really want to avoid taking damage from because a lot of healing needs to be focused on the tank who is taking a lot of damage from Mangle. Believe it or not HoSac on the tank and AW worked well together here. Have I mentioned how much I love HoSac enough? Best Cd ever!

Three dps climb up on Magmaw and use their mouse to target the spike, and spam 1 for Constricting Chains till you bring that bitch down. As mentioned before this is where you pop everything to restore your mana and throw out whatever dps you can add to the fray. All the while use up HoPo to get everyone back to full health and ready to transition back into phase one.

After a celebratory pic and ten minute break we headed over to Omnitron and got in some good attempts. I expect it will not take us much time to down the fight on Monday so you can expect a guide for the fight to be posted soon. Hope you’re enjoying these encounters as much as I am.